But when you think about it how many iconic scores can you name? You can go through the normal list I guess (Jurassic Park, Jaws, Star Wars etc etc) but those themselves are very rare. There have been the odd few. Lord of the Rings. I'd argue the most recent and most memorable to the wide public would surely be Harry Potter?
And I can hum The Dark Knight and Inception themes but I'm not sure how well known they actually are. Zimmer's Inception score got A LOT of praise though.
You can always look back and say look how iconic they are! But they're only iconic cause they stood the test of time then, think of the hundreds of other films that had soundtracks during those years. There's definitely some now that will have the same impact years from now.
I don't think you need a wait for years before we can say how iconic the movie theme was. Do we have to wait for 3-4 years before we can say the soundtrack in LOTR is iconic? Most of the time iconic scores have an immediate impact, right after we walk out of the theatre.
Hunger games, Abrams' Star Trek, Harry potter (though that's over a decade old at this point, though I loved Alexandre Desplat's score for the final two). Desplat and Giaccino are my two favorite composers working today.
I like their works, but it's hard to find a catchy and easily memorable tune in their works. If someone played their musical arrangement over the radio, I would probably not be able to name the movie.
None of the recent works have an ability to annouce a movie in the same manner movie themes from LOTR, Back to the Future, Jurassic Park and Star Wars.
I don't think that recent composers like Desplat and Giaccino have matched the achievement of earlier generation of composers. They make some really nice music, but I will not call them iconic in any way.
It has annoyed you that there haven't been any iconic original scores as of late? Really? The bar is set at iconic?
I'm sorry, but that seems like a pretty bizarre barometer to me. There's a reason why we haven't seen it that often, as it's not exactly an easy milestone to achieve. Anyway, I can't recall any scores I'd consider iconic either in the last decade or so, but I've heard plenty of damn good ones. My favorite in recent times would have to be the Tron: Legacy OST. Mediocre movie, but Daft Punk hit a home run with the score.
Yet it has usually been fairly easily to name iconic movie soundtrack up until the early 2000s at the very least. You can easily name iconic soundtrack from every half a decade and chances are people will remember the tune. What I am saying is there seems like there has been a dark age of iconic film scores in recent years compared to the early 2000s and the 1990s.
We have a huge amount of major blockbusters and superheroes movies, yet none of their scores had become iconic in the same manner as scores from the original Spiderman trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean, LOTR and Jurassic Park. It used to be fairly easy to remember the tunes from major blockbusters.
The current and new generation of composers seems to pale in comparison to composers that established themselves in earlier decade.
